


Wounds Being Cold [a remix]

by Lilliburlero



Category: Henry IV Part 1 - Shakespeare
Genre: Aging, Dreams, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Literally Everyone Is Called Henry, M/M, Other Warnings May Apply, Period Typical Attitudes, Pre-Canon, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-27 03:36:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20401027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: The Earl of Northumberland has been keeping an eye on his son's association with a certain flashy gentleman of Eastcheap. So has the King.





	Wounds Being Cold [a remix]

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ConvenientAlias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConvenientAlias/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Stabbed in the Pride and in the Side](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17957354) by [ConvenientAlias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConvenientAlias/pseuds/ConvenientAlias). 

The parlour at Eltham was stylish and comfortable, with hints of daring modernity in its light oak panelling and a south wall that was all slender, tall, glassed windows. Four of these contained a delicate stained roundel depicting a bird or beast: baboon, pelican, swan and eagle. The central one bore the royal arms and a banderole with a Lancaster motto: _Souveignez de moi_. 

_Command or plea?_ Henry Percy asked himself. It was not a question that would have occurred to him last October, when he and his brother had sat in this room for the first time, on the Coronation planning committee. Tom had nudged him heavily in the ribs and muttered, ‘Ho-Ho, I have a feeling we’re not in Alnwick any more,’ affecting the slack-jawed gape of a yokel, which irritated Henry almost as much as the use of his nursery nickname.

Then, though, the room had matched its master: sober yet dashing, popular yet distinguished, cosmopolitan yet indubitably native. What devastation half a year and an easily-suppressed rebellion had wrought upon this model of Christian chivalry was nothing short of astonishing. The King was just two score years of age, against Henry’s three, but he had not one more hair on his head, nor tooth within it; he rose just as stiffly, and his shoulders were more bent. In contrast to these tokens of age, his skin, fiery with pustules and dusty with scurf, was that of a crack-voiced boy.

But of course, the Epiphany business had one consequence that made it much more than a hapless little protest. It wasn’t as if Bolingbroke hadn’t been warned of the danger of leaving spare kings lying about. Richard should not have been allowed to linger a moment longer than was necessary. The King was too much in love with his own magnanimity, that he showed to everyone save his own harried offspring. Henry couldn’t blame the Prince of Wales for breaking out so spectacularly. It was what he would have done himself: swive yourself dry, drench yourself in booze again, wring out and repeat. He sometimes wondered if _his_ Henry—martial, touchy, so very, _very_ honourable—hadn’t been swapped at birth with King Henry’s Henry. (Robin Goodfellow and his fairies could do that sort of thing, couldn’t they, put a girdle around England and Wales, Warkworth to Monmouth, in less time than it took to say a paternoster?) Or at least, he had wondered that, until he had seen what he saw the other night.

The King’s spies had seen it too. That was why Henry had been summoned here.

‘We’re finding it a little difficult to believe that your son did not recognise—ours.’ 

‘He often doesn’t. Perhaps your Majesty will recall, when we met, close by Berkeley last year. He said he’d never seen you before. I was embarrassed.’

‘I’d spent much time from home, even before my—exile. And I was considerably travel-stained.’

Henry remembered him as he was then, an honest, blunt English knight, desirous of nothing more than his own again, flushed with righteous indignation. Had his predecessors been but mortals and not Angevin demi-gods, the King might have been accounted handsome. He was made more in the Hainault mould, dark and stocky, but his features, when not as now inflamed with boils, were even and noble, his physique firm and muscular. Perhaps more the sort of thing that other men nodded at in approval than maids swooned over, but—Henry recalled himself to the conversation.

‘Well, that’s just it. My Harry’s all right as long as the surroundings are familiar, but if someone shows up unexpectedly—it’s as if he can’t see their face at all. A failing, in a courtier.’

‘Hm.’ The King drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. His nails were bitten down so far that some of the bed, raw and spongy, was exposed. ‘A soldier needs only to recognise a surcoat.’

‘The arts of peace are important too.’

It was the wrong thing to say. The King was in a belligerent mood.

‘I mean,’ Henry added ingratiatingly, ‘stabilise the realm through diplomacy, that we might then further the fight for God’s glory in the Holy Land.’ He always fell for that. Funny how simple-minded intelligent men could be, when you got them upon their hobby-horses. Henry fancied himself as least as intelligent, if nothing like as learned, as the King, but he did not have hobby horses, unless keeping always on the winning side counted as a hobby horse. Mind you, his Harry had hobby horses, that he spurred as hotly as the flesh and blood ones, and was not even intelligent.

The King’s scowl turned to a forgiving, benefit-of-the-doubtish smile.

‘We applaud your piety, my lord Northumberland. But the matter at hand is the—association between our sons.’

Henry couldn’t see that it mattered; might even do both of them some good. Relax his Harry and stiffen the other one. Could he say that? Perhaps, very carefully, he could. He leaned across the table.

‘My liege, when my son and I met that travel-stained gentleman hard by Berkeley Castle, I confess I still entertained some hope that his family and mine might be allied by happy and fecund nuptial. But my Meg is—I trust—in the bosom of Abraham, and the lovely princesses, well, are _princesses_, and must be contracted for the good of our realm, as far above mere second and third sons of a peer as Luna shining in the silence of the night.’

The King raised heavy-lidded eyes in nothing quite as vulgar as an actual roll.

‘But it strikes me that a manly amity may serve many of the functions of a marriage and is as enduring as the sacrament, more so, perhaps, since man’s frailty, and the shortness of woman’s bloom, prompt him to fornication, whereas _friendship_—’

‘Manly amity.’ The syllables dropped from the King’s chapped, protuberant underlip like pebbles into a well. ‘That’s all very good, isn’t it, if one can be assured of the—virility of all concerned?’ He paused, cleared his throat. 'Cry you mercy, we mean to throw the aspersion but on the head of our own issue.’

Henry drew a sharp breath and slumped back on the settle. He did not hesitate, when Harry was in one of his pets, to call him womanish to his face, but that was a very different thing from this insinuation, behind the boy’s back, and to an inferior.

‘The stout affection of an upright youth of noble blood could do much to mitigate the effeminate effects of dabbling with punks and gluttons. Cheer up, my good lord. A lot of young men go through a disreputable phase. He’ll get over it, and it’ll probably teach him something about the people he has one day to govern.’

‘Richard didn’t. And he didn’t learn a thing.’

That was it, of course, the King’s curious, indelible conviction that his son took after his cousin more than himself. It was true that the Prince had the Plantagenet looks: the height, the golden curls, the athletic frame and debonair comportment that Henry remembered admiring in his great-grandfather. (Christ’s teeth, he was old.) And the King would say his son shared Richard’s incontinent lusts and taste for base company, as if there were no difference between tupping Eastcheap drabs in a froth of small ale, and showering land, offices and plate upon new-knighted flattering sons of scullions.

It was envy, Henry thought suddenly, the King’s deranged envy of Richard displaced onto the nearest suitable object. He couldn’t understand it. In every way this king was a better king, a better man than Richard had been: more just, more godly, more merciful. He was a better statesman, a better scholar, an _infinitely_ better soldier and sportsman, a father of strong sons and fair daughters. He even had a better singing voice. But no-one would ever wear a certain sort of shoe or hat simply because Harry Bolingbroke did; he would never draw a knot of followers and hold them rapt with just nods and smiles, making them feel good about themselves with his mere presence; he would never _glow_. Henry had always thought that those things just came along with the crown; now he saw they did not. They came along with Richard, they came with the present Prince of Wales. They did not come with Bolingbroke, and he would never forgive either of them for it.

‘We understand young Percy was—assaulted, that evening. We trust he was not injured.’

That was interesting. So there were some things the spies did not see, or did not report. Henry had assumed that the Prince’s close companion, who had done a very decent bit of field surgery on Harry’s wound, was the surveillance. Acting on that suspicion, he’d made a few enquiries himself: Edward Poins, second son of Sir Maurice Poins. Sir Maurice had been the only Englishman of name to fall at the Battle of Margate; having arrogated to himself one of the six and thirty thousand hogsheads of Castilian wine captured in that glorious engagement, he feasted the crew of his carrack and fell, unnoticed, overboard. The eldest son, heritor to three hundred acres of scrubby, mortgaged Gloucestershire, was as sober a brute as the father had been a drunken one; the middle child, a daughter, was notorious in Tewkesbury for sorcery. Henry thought this modern fancy for decrying all and sundry as witches quite absurd. Everyone knew that women on the marges of childbearing—maids starting off, and matrons on their way out the other side—went potty in irritating but ultimately harmless ways, but it was always they who were accused. Probably this Ellen Poins was the same. Anyway, her arrest (she was acquitted) seemed to have been exactly the push the younger Poins needed to run off and sell his sword. He claimed to have lived with a Moorish physician in Algeciras, and learned chirurgery from him. Others said he had been the Moor’s catamite, and was the Prince’s. Henry didn’t think much of the King’s choice of informant, if that was the case, but all the more reason to get the Prince some sensible company of roughly his own class about him—

The King cocked his head expectantly; the bags under his eyes and incipient sagging jowls lent the irresistible impression of a hound without much instinct, that someone had taken pity on and kept as a house pet.

‘Only his pride, my gracious lord,’ Henry said hurriedly.

‘And nothing was stolen?’

‘No. I mean, not really. One of his Highness’ followers brought back the goods the next day. It was, as you see, just high spirits. A prank.’

This was not quite true. Upon examining his returned belongings Harry had flown into a rage at the absence of a copper seal-ring, a gift from an old austringer who had been his constant companion at eight years of age. At length Henry had persuaded him that it must have been—indeed regrettably—lost in the scuffle, for what thief in his senses would return angel nobles and bonds to the value of several pounds, and keep a gewgaw not worth eightpence when it was new?

‘The sort of prank for which lowlier spirits might mount from their smoky cribs to the height of the gallows, but no matter.’ The King uncurled his left fist and winced. The heavy rings were presumably supposed to distract the eye away from his purple, swollen knuckles, but once noticed, they had the opposite effect. Henry, who certainly had his days—especially in an Alnwick winter—when his hand would not close around a hilt, wondered at the mixture of vanity and insecurity that prompted the King to add half a pound of cumbersome gold to the pain of rheumatic joints. ‘No,’ he continued, ‘we appreciate your counsel on the point of our son’s delinquency, but the risk to young Percy’s character is too great. He must not be drawn into such degeneracy. Our pleasure is that you both go north, drive back the obstreperous and overweening Scot.’

Henry supposed this was what he’d let himself in for, getting this close to Bolingbroke: rattling up and down the country in convoy, lurching and rolling on the North Sea or the Channel. He thought it was what he most dearly wanted, but he was too old for it, really, as he had been too old to father his first son, who was too young yet to be given his hot head in anything more important than bashing Scots on theirs.

The King called a servant to summon officials and secretaries from the antechamber. The informal portion of the meeting was concluded.

That night the Lords Percy lay at St Albans Abbey. Henry refused accommodation in the lavish guesthouse and dinner with the Abbot, citing fatigue, a desire for contemplation and penance. Really he just wanted a plain pilgrim’s cell to himself, away from his son’s tirades. But still sleep eluded him. The inside of his eyelid seemed a panel on which the Prince was painted, wearing the vermilion hose, green doublet, saffron gown and hood that was his ostentatious Eastcheap incognito—but the details gave him away, the rich dye and cross-grain cut of the nether garments, that clung so tightly to his well-turned calves and lean thighs that you could see the musculature outlined, the dense pleats of the gown, that couldn’t be achieved with any but the finest new wool. The next panel had Harry in it, unstylish, begrimed, flushed and ruffled, but enjoying the arm slung about his neck and the long kiss planted on his lips, despite the Prince’s half-abstracted, half-satirical air.

Then, somehow, they became Bolingbroke and Richard, as they had been at nineteen years of age, and though their bodies were hidden by the longer gowns of twenty years ago, Henry knew by the position of their feet and Richard’s stoop that he was pressing an erection against Bolingbroke’s hip, and Bolingbroke was self-disgustedly aroused, hard himself. Henry knew what it was, to be tempted like that. He could almost feel Richard’s nudging cock, the pulse and twitch in his own groin. He had to stop it.

He rushed forward. ‘My Lord, dispatch—’ The document was stuffed into his braies belt, he realised with relief. That was what was causing the bulge there, not his member. He pulled out the vellum roll. ‘And read o’er these articles—’

Richard spun around, letting the gown fall from his shoulders. He was naked. Not symbolically naked in a penitent’s shift, as he had appeared in Westminster Hall that day, but bare as he was born, and curiously innocent, as complete nakedness always renders a man. His prick was soft, the hair trailing up to his navel sparse and golden. The ivory of his belly was marked with a crimson gash beneath the ribs, just where Harry had been scratched by those ruffians, just where—Henry gasped, and dared not look at his hands or feet.

‘Mine eyes are full of tears,’ Richard said, saddened by Henry’s sins, that drove hard nails in, saddened by the sins of all the world, that crushed thorns down upon on his lovely brow, broke his rosy skin.

Henry came to, panting and seamed in greasy sweat—not just sweat, he realised, touching his abdomen under his shirt to find it loathsome with spilt seed. His belly cramped in shame; he rolled onto his side, curling up as tight as his creaky shanks would let him, and sobbed. He was an old man, an old old old old man, too old for policy, intrigue, or war. Too old for love or grace. He wished he could stay in bed forever; perhaps he could: feign sickness until the real thing overtook him, as a counterfeit sleep sometimes brings on the genuine article. His eventual slumber, borne of tears which had flowed only twice before in fifty years, was an exhausted blank.

He slept through Prime, but was wakened shortly afterwards by a thunderous hammering on the cell door. His manservant, who had occupied a pallet outside, poked his nose around the door and said, ‘Sir Henry, my lord,’ but Harry was already looming over his head.

Henry propped himself on the bolster and prised open eyes which felt as crusted as if he'd spent the night on the sea-strand.

‘Hullo, Harry. The Abbot had strict instructions to give you a hangover. Slow you down a bit.’

‘The old devil _tried_. I thought you might like to hear Mass before we set off.’

That was thoughtful of him: Harry took a fairly cavalier attitude to the state of his own soul, so this was an offer made with his father’s feelings in mind. ’Yes, I think so. One ought to be in a state of grace before attempting Ermine Street. Lots of footpads, highwaymen and so forth.’

He could see Harry consciously, and uncharacteristically, trying to take that well. Something had got to him, this fine spring morning. He turned on his heel. ‘Very well, Father. I’ll let you get dressed.’

‘Are you all right?’

He paused with his fingers on the latch. ‘Yes. Why shouldn’t I be? Except for the Abbot’s claret. Goes down too easy, and gives you queer dreams.’ He hung his head, but did not move to leave.

‘You don’t have any truck with prophecies and premonitions.’ Harry could, like most such sceptics, be extremely tedious about it.

‘No—’ he said slowly, and then added quickly, ‘last night I dreamt I was the King.’

‘You can’t behead a dream for treason. Just tell it to bugger off.’

‘Not that I was _king_,’ he replied with a familiar exasperation, still facing the door. ‘That I was _the_ King. I was myself as well, you know how that goes in dreams. The Prince of Wales was there, and I was giving him a right old dressing down about his dissolute habits, saying I wished he was me—me-me, that is, not King Henry-me—I say, this is all a lot of old rubbish, isn’t it?’ He finally turned his lowered head, and gave a sheepish grin.

Henry was about to utter some platitude about _somnium_ and _insomnium_, true dreams and false, but before he could, Harry blurted, ‘Then he kissed me. Like—like. You know when. But I was his father. Filthy, isn’t it?’

It was, in a way. Though whether it was any more or less so than what had happened in real life, Henry could not say. Especially not at this hour of the morning. He put aside the bedclothes, bringing an unwelcome gust of chill vernal air into contact with his feet and knees. Where were the sweet, soft Aprils of long ago?

’Look here, Harry—’ he began. 

‘No—no it isn’t—I don’t—’ With a roar of rage Harry punched the door, then wrenched it open and fled. Henry listened to the crash of his son’s departing steps for a moment, then sighed and called in his bodyservant.

The ride back to Alnwick took fifteen days. Plenty of time of time for two of the highest in the land, burdened with other cares, to dismiss and forget two foolish dreams. But through rolling pasture, noisome fen, wild and lonely moor, Henry’s vision of Richard haunted him. And he knew, not with any special paternal intuition, of which to his knowledge he had none, but because the young Hotspur of the North could not conceal a feeling if his very soul depended on it, that Harry’s troubled him too, and neither of them would know rest until something was done. It just remained to be seen what _something_ was.

**Author's Note:**

> Title: Henry IV Part One: I, iii
> 
> Souveignez de moi: remember me.
> 
> Battle of Margate: a decisive English naval victory of 1387, over a combined French, Castilian and Flemish fleet. A _lot_ of wine was seized.


End file.
